Emails between Elon Musk and the Texas Governor's office have been deemed 'intimate' and 'embarrassing' in a bid for them to be released to the public, but officials are refusing to comply with requests from journalists.
Since predominantly moving away from California, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley, Elon Musk has taken many of his businesses to the state of Texas, basing primary operations for Tesla and SpaceX in the southern part of the United States.
Musk recently dropped the early stages of Tesla's Robotaxi program onto key areas of Austin, and he even won a major vote to establish his own city named 'Starbase' for SpaceX operations south of Corpus Christi.
However, current Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has refused to comply with requests from The Texas Newsroom to release email communications with Elon Musk, despite significant public support for the matter.
How has Texas Gov. responded to the requests?
As reported by the New York Post, Greg Abbot and the governor's office have repeatedly pushed back against requests from The Texas Newsroom to disclose email communication with Musk in a strange chain of events.
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The request itself was made to track and outline Musk's 'growing influence' in Texas as a whole, especially following his aforementioned newly established company town, and it was requested that emails dating back to last fall were fully disclosed.
Initial communications saw the office request a fee of $244.64, indicating that it would take over 13 hours to review and share the email records, but upon receiving this payment it then revealed that all emails were in fact confidential.
The office then requested that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton formally approve the withholding of these documents, with public information coordinator Matthew Taylor claiming that their release "would have a chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision making process."
It has cited common-law privacy as the reason why the documents cannot be released, but public records attorney Bill Aleshire has argued that this is typically reserved for protecting the identity of children or health records, not communications with wealthy individuals over business interests.
Taylor wrote that the records detailing the office's communication with Musk contain "information that is intimate and embarrassing and not of legitimate concern to the public, including financial decisions that do not relate to transactions between an individual and a government body."
What exactly this 'intimate' and 'embarrassing' content could amount to is entirely unclear, but what does remain obvious is that both the governor's office and Musk's team will do as much as possible to prevent their release.
Unfortunately, a recent Texas Supreme Court ruling has made it so that only the Supreme Court itself can determine whether high-ranking officials are in breach of public information laws, making it incredible difficult to legally push against efforts that are currently being exhibited by the governor's office.